To Blog or Not to Blog…That is the Question.

It’s Mamakat’s Writer’s Workshop time again.  This week’s prompt:

4.) Share some blogging advice.

Wondering whether to remain a guilt-free, sane member of the masses of lurkers or join the other commitment-laden half and start a blog?  Maybe this will help you decide.

Top 10 Reasons to Blog:

1. Like yesterday’s post, blogging gives you license to rant and rave about things that bug you and gives the general public free access to experience you in all your PMS glory.
2. No longer do you have to be bothered by face to face interaction.  You can interact with family,good friends, and newly rediscovered Facebook friends exclusively through your posts and comments.  You can entertain your deepest hermit desires.  No more dinner dates, church callings, outings, and PTA Meetings.  Save money on movies, make-up, hairspray, deoderant, and underwear.  Especially helpful in the current economic crisis.
3. Change simple to sublime.  Think you lead an embarrassingly ordinary life?  Who needs to know, when you’ve got a flair for exaggeration?  Before you know it a stroll to the park has become a 5K  training run for your upcoming qualifying race for next year’s New York City Marathon you’ll be participating in at the end of a girl’s weekend of broadway shows, shopping and club hopping. See?  How hard was that?  Same thing, just more impressive.
4. You can have your very own celebrity worthy blog stalker.  The guy from Kentuckaderby, Arkansas that your Blog Statter reports visits your blog in the wee hours of every morning for hours on end.  Keep your eyes peeled for a dark Mercury Marquis with pimped out rims and the Confederate flag lurking around  town.
5. Find out who your true friends really are.  After posting your URL on your Facebook wall, in your Christmas  letter, as your email signature and in the ward bulletin every week, everyone you know should be reading it, right?  But only your true friends (and that creepy stalker guy) will. “What have you been up to lately, Wenderful?”  You’d know if you’d been reading the blog. Not true friend.  “Where are your fake reading glasses, Wenderful?”  Most definitely a true friend!
6. You have vastly more leverage to use with your close friends and family.  Need a free ticket out of hosting Thanksgiving next year?  Tell your sister if she hosts instead you promise not to post those incriminating pictures of her birthing her last baby.  Works like a charm…unless she has a blog of her own.  In which case the potential for a blogging war is catastrophically high.
7. The budding writer in you can increase her pool of critics and editors.  Not sure your use of the word “contretemps” was accurate?  Just wait for the masses to get wind of it and you can count on plenty of “constructive alternative suggestions” to litter your comment box.  Helpful, no?
8. You can fill the world wide blogging world with misinformation.  Did you know that flossing is directly related to the number of grandkids you’ll have?  That crossing your legs can lead to Alzheimers?  That if you smile too much you’ll eventually lose your hearing?  That if you don’t comment on my blog, I’ll sic my creepy stalker guy on you?  That Pluto and Goofy are actually played by the same guy?  Snopes will love you.
9. With Photoshop, a blog, and your new hermit status, nobody will ever know that your South-Beach-Atkins-Grapefruit-Cabbage-Slim-Fast-Best-Life diet hasn’t worked.
10. Got too much free time?  Start a blog to fill in those gaps between cooking, cleaning, working, child rearing, laundry, exercising, bill paying, church callings, appointment making, appointment going, scrapbooking, carpool driving, eating, sleeping, bathing, and breathing.

Happy Tuesday!